Barack Obama and the Three Hundred

Three hundred Americans are going to Iraq—or no more than that, anyway, President Obama said on Thursday. They will be “advisers” to the government there, as it fights militants associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham who are moving across the country. The President said that the advisers would not go into battle themselves: “American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again.” Rather, they would find other ways to be helpful, if they could, and “assess how we can best train, advise, and support Iraqi security forces going forward.”

As the President continued, talking about intelligence sharing and joint operations and security for our embassy, he could hardly have looked less enthusiastic. If Obama had his way, those three hundred advisers would probably all stand in Iraqi offices and barracks with megaphones and repeat his only sensible advice: that there has to be an Iraqi political solution to this crisis, that the Iraqi government has to tell itself that it is not just a sectarian force. But that’s not what the government of Nuri al-Maliki wants to hear; he and his allies seem more interested in knowing when we are going to carry out some air strikes against ISIS (which Obama, using a different translation of the Arabic name, called I.S.I.L.) or against others whom they see as enemies.

Obama suggested that Maliki’s government—and those in this country who are unaccountably nostalgic for the days when Americans fought in Iraq—might get a bit of what they wanted. “Because of our increased intelligence resources, we’re developing more information about potential targets associated with I.S.I.L., and, going forward, we will be prepared to take targeted and precise military action if and when we determine that the situation on the ground requires it,” he said. As a form of advice, targeting coördinates appear more likely to be heeded than Obama’s somewhat plaintive assertion that “national-unity meetings have to go forward to build consensus across Iraq’s different communities.” The challenge will be when the Iraqis, and some people in this country, ask for more military action that is less and less precise.

“Do you have any confidence in Prime Minister al-Maliki at this point?” a reporter from the Wall Street Journal asked. “And can your—can Maliki bring political stability to Iraq?”

Before the President answered, he sighed. “As I said, it’s not our job to choose Iraq’s leaders,” he said. This did not sound like an endorsement. It certainly didn’t sound as if he wished he did have that job. There was “no secret” that the leaders of Iraq’s various communities were divided. His Administration had “consulted” with Maliki about that, but it all didn’t seem to be working. The President is offering up three hundred voices to tell the Iraqis things that they either already know or don’t want to hear.

“Part of the reason why we saw better-equipped Iraqi security forces with larger numbers not be able to hold contested territory against I.S.I.L. probably reflects that lack of a sense of commitment on the part of Sunni communities to work with Baghdad,” Obama said. How is military “training” by advisers going to help with that? Training can turn into a late-quagmire fetish: the idea that local forces who engaged in intractable battles just need to learn how to fight properly can be a trap. Mass desertion, of the sort that led to the fall of Mosul, is a political question, not a matter of learning how to drill. Training can sometimes mean telling the Army you’re working with not to engage in abuses; the proper verb, then, might be restraining, which some have argued is America’s proper job when it comes to Iraq, and why we ought to have left a residual force there. Under this theory, we should give the Shiite-dominated Maliki government guns, and then stand by them, because if we don’t they will point the guns at the wrong people—at members of the Sunni community. How does a mission like that end?

A reporter asked Obama whether he wished that he’d left a residual force when we took our troops out of Iraq. That, he said, was also Maliki’s call—we would have needed a status of forces agreement, one that gave Americans a certain degree of legal indemnity, and Maliki wouldn’t give us one. How hard Obama negotiated for such an agreement, and whether he in any way saw the absence of such an agreement as a loss, is debatable. (He has talked about the end of our engagement in Iraq as an accomplishment, and has every right to.) In any case, we don’t have one now. If our three hundred advisers turn into something else—which could all too easily happen, as one piece of advice leads to another—will our forces then have immunity?

On Tuesday, Dick and Liz Cheney published a column in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that it was a shame and a failure that the American war—which the elder Cheney had helped start—had not gone on and on. American soldiers, they suggested, should be there right now. “It is time the president and his allies faced some hard truths: America remains at war, and withdrawing troops from the field of battle while our enemies stay in the fight does not ‘end’ wars. Weakness and retreat are provocative.”

In the Cheneys’ contorted diagram of history, going to war is itself a victory. They seem to see Iraq’s wreckage as a vindication of that war, not an indictment of it. It is difficult, otherwise, to explain their contempt for Obama’s withdrawal of troops. (“President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch.”) On this question, the Cheneys appear to be out of touch even with many in their own party. When Megyn Kelly, interviewing the Cheneys on Fox News, told Cheney that he had made a historic mistake in Iraq, he seemed startled enough to address her as “Reagan.” Perhaps the Cheneys and other conservatives do realize that the American public has come to view the Iraq War as a disaster, and have simply persuaded themselves that the only way to void that judgment is to get the war going again.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.

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